For Pogo, who likes to call himself a pirate, this is not
quite the buried treasure it seems: Turning trash into soil is a
lengthy endeavor with high overhead. The microbes that heat the
piles to 160 degrees work for free, but everything else
costs.
"The equipment just kills you," he said as he stood in
front of a new wood-grinding machine that sells for $340,000 and
shakes itself to bits in a few short years. But "I'm not
complaining, I make 10 percent" profit on the enterprise.
In recent years green recycling has become big business;
the Montgomery County government converts residential yard waste
into 77,000 tons of commercial compost a year, most of it bagged and
sold as Leafgro to consumers through mass merchandisers.
Bulk compost is another commercially popular item, which
homeowners and landscapers alike use to dig into and improve poor
soil, to create vegetable beds, and to lay thinly on lawns at
seeding time.
Increasingly, gardeners recognize that the beneficial fungi
and bacteria in compost foster a healthy world of microbes that work
to strengthen and invigorate everything from turf grass to oak
trees. Many ardent gardeners make their own, but for those who
don't, or who need lots of the stuff, the reliance on commercial
sources also means a leap of faith: There are no government
standards for selling compost so consumers don't know, for example,
if a load was adequately composted to kill weed seeds or even the
ingredients in it.
Pogo says he has produced compost in as little as six
weeks, but abandoned that model in favor of a slower method that he
believes produces a finer product.
The compost is known as some of the best on the East Coast,
said James Sotillo, who runs an organic landscape business in East
Hampton, N.Y. Sotillo has bypassed closer sources to buy compost
from Pogo, which Sotillo uses to brew a "tea" that he sprays on the
estates of wealthy clients in the Hamptons. Pogo, he said, is
interested in making good compost, not in simply processing debris,
and like fine wine, it cannot be hurried.
As Pogo, 50, flits from pile to pile at his remote farm off
New Hampshire Avenue near Brookeville, he is clearly consumed by the
idea of tiny creatures feeding off wood and brush, and turning it
into gardener's gold. He declares himself still a hippie, but then
modifies the description to a "guerrilla capitalist." Like the
compost itself, he has mellowed with time. He has, after all, come a
long way from difficult beginnings. He dropped out of high school,
worked as a racetrack blacksmith and descended into drugs and
alcohol. When he picked himself up, sober, he bought a chain saw at
a yard sale and went door to door looking for tree work. This later
blossomed into a bona fide tree company that continues today, along
with the nursery in Olney. He operates under a number of
enterprises, including Pogo Organic Tree Products (www.pogoscompost.com).
He sells the compost and mulch from a second site, a small
yard on Spencerville Road, a location that gives little clue to the
scale of the mother compost operation or the vision behind
it.
For that, one travels a long, winding and unmarked dirt
road to reach the 180-acre site, a former farm whose terrain today
is defined by maintenance sheds, heavy equipment, and the eerie
sensation of walking not on mud or dirt but a vast brown-black
sponge.
Between this ground rise dozens of piles of various sizes,
textures and shades of brown, from a light tan to near black. Some
are as high as 20 feet and almost as long as a football field.
One pile consists of raw logs and stumps, some from trees
that look to be a century old or more. These are too coarse even for
the grinding machine, so a machine with a steel beak snips them into
long shards. Bleached by the sun, the splintered trunks look like
stacks of dinosaur bones. Front-end loaders and dump trucks move the
piles from one area to another, for additional grinding and
aerating.
Old mulch, brush and topsoil make for easy compost -- the
mix is screened two or three times before fully decomposing -- but
the more woody material takes as many as a dozen grindings and
screenings and at least seven months before it yields a product that
satisfies Pogo.
Some of his finished compost derives mostly from leaves. It
is black and rich looking and finely textured. Pogo picks it up in
his callused hands as if to cradle the rich microbial life it
supports. "This tested nicely," he said, referring to the laboratory
tests of microbial life in this dirt.
As you scan the acres of piles you imagine that this is the
place that all the trees in Washington come to die, or at least the
ones knocked down last year by Hurricane Isabel. No, says Pogo, just
the normal arboreal carnage of a 10-mile radius around him: trees
taken down for infill lots in Bethesda, the brush and trees from
arborists working in Silver Spring; the clearing of woodland for new
subdivisions near Gaithersburg. According to a new study sponsored
by the National Park Service and the Washington Metropolitan Council
of Governments, between 28 and 43 square miles of green space in the
region are lost each day to development.
Pogo accepts this reality, decries the burying of old trees
in landfills, and is clearly driven by the need to make some good
out of it. "I have an empathy for trees and creatures," he said, and
no one who meets him could doubt it. Tall, slightly stooped, his
furrowed brow and flinty blue eyes are framed by a mop of salt and
pepper hair and a bushy beard sometimes gathered into a braid. He
seems comfortable in this skin, blithe to his resemblance to a
hirsute Charleston Heston playing Moses.
And prophet might be a better metaphor than pirate, because
Pogo now is moving beyond compost production to embrace organic
gardening's next big thing -- the use of brews of beneficial
bacteria and fungi to feed and medicate turf and ornamental plants.
The most common product is a compost tea -- non-chlorinated water
brewed into a plant broth by aerating a submerged tube full of
compost, sugars, proteins, acids and other ingredients for 24 hours.
The result is a liquid teeming with microbes that are then applied
to plants, sometimes as foliar sprays.
The makers of brewing kits sell directly to gardeners, some
garden centers sell the brew by the gallon, and commercial systems
are available for organic farmers. Pogo is interested in the next
step: providing compost tea and other organic products to homeowners
with regular visits from the tanker truck.
This already is big in the Pacific Northwest and
California. Sotillo, an arborist for 20 years, began his treatments
on Long Island in December of 2001. "Here, it's huge, and on the
West coast, it's gigantic."
Each property's soil is tested for microbe levels, and the
tea ingredients are adjusted for site specific needs, he said. "It
works, it works great," he says.
Pogo used compost tea in small batches for the past two
years for his tree clients, but he is now gearing up to provide a
dedicated organic spray service like Sotillo's, hiring an expert
named Kevin John Richardson.
Richardson has been spraying yards, golf courses and farms
in the West before coming to work in Maryland. Richardson has rigged
a truck with a huge plastic tank (actually three separate tanks
totaling 1,100 gallons) in which the tea is brewed directly. It is
critical, he said, to use the tea as soon after brewing as possible
to deliver the maximum number of microbes.
As Richardson is explaining this, Pogo arrives in his truck
with boxes containing tens of thousands of red wiggler earthworms,
which he is raising in an old metal farm trailer nearby. He is
rearing the worms for their manure -- castings -- used both as a
fertilizer directly and a key ingredient in brewing the compost
tea.
A worm produces its own weight in castings each day and
Pogo reckons he could sell or use two tons of castings daily,
meaning 4,000 pounds of seething worm.
He is not, yet, the true believer that Richardson is. Some
of his doubts are fueled by farmer friends who came of age with
chemical pesticides and fertilizers and advocate them. They may be
right, he says, "but then I run into people like Kevin. Are we going
to drive Monsanto and all the other chemical companies bankrupt? I
seriously doubt that. I think we can do some good."
Sotillo is a convert, but he draws inspiration too in
Pogo's journey from addict to luminary in the world of organics.
"There's a classic American story," he said.
© 2004 The Washington Post
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